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Wine Software Operating Systems Windows Linux

WineConf 2005 Sets Deadline for Wine 0.9 179

Posted by timothy from the windows-users-decant-of-your-sins dept.
IamTheRealMike writes "As WineConf 2005 took place last weekend, the Wine developers discussed the project's direction and future. A new deadline of September 30th for the 0.9 release was set by Alexandre Julliard -- the release promises to bring an end to the system of monthly snapshots and provide a new focus on ease of use and stability. A new GPLd application regression testing tool called CXTest was demoed, as was some of the great Direct3D work being done lately. Finally the CEO of Gupta gave a talk. Gupta have ported their 4GL RAD tools to Linux by working with Codeweavers (who sponsored the event), and their experiences were documented in a fascinating presentation. Overall: big thumbs up, but it's not obvious enough that there's enterprise-level support available for Wine. Check out the group photo and the new Wiki!"
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WineConf 2005 Sets Deadline for Wine 0.9 More

WineConf 2005 Sets Deadline for Wine 0.9

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  • Deadlines (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Made only to be broken.

  • I could be out of line... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wcitech ( 798381 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @01:54PM (#12433538)
    Call me crazy, but isn't it deadlines like these that cause software products to often be lacking? I might understand if this were a major for-profit corporation who NEEDED a release in order to satisfy their fiscal department, but isn't this an open-source not-for-profit project? Why have deadlines?

    • Re:I could be out of line... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Motivation?
      • I guess this is because it's very important to set goals. While the deadline in itself is kind of annoying, one can afford to wait for the perfect software while it has a (better) running version.

        • Re:I could be out of line... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by h4rm0ny ( 722443 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:42PM (#12433986) Journal

          The critical difference is who sets the deadline. A bunch of developers saying "we want to have it done by dd/mm/yy" may be good motivation. A manager or salesman coming in and saying "it will be done by now()" is not - most of us have probably had to deal with people like that at some point. It's not good.

          The deadlines we set ourselves are hopefully sensible ones.
    • Deadlines encourage the development of critical components that are the most needed at the time. While this can lead to bad things if the time constraints are unrealistic, it's better than open-ended all-over-the-map kind of work you'd get otherwise.
    • Why have deadlines?

      Well from a project standpoint, it's a motivational tool to have everything in order within a resonable time. Just because its a community effort does not mean there shouldn't be deadlines.

      With a deadline, developers can hurry up and finish their contributions so that the organizer can assess where they are at and set new goals. Deadlines are not just fiscal.

      Imagine hiring a contractor to build your house. Wouldn't you set a deadline? Without one how can you plan on the next phase of

    • Re:I could be out of line... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by m50d ( 797211 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:11PM (#12433699) Homepage Journal
      Like debian, wine has been far too long without a stable release. By all means don't rush it, but you do need to actually release a working version once in a while. At the moment any stable version of wine is stable purely through luck - they're just cvs snapshots.
      • And 0.9 is "stable?" I thought 1.0 was the stable release...
        • It's the difference between beta and alpha. A 0.9 release will be a lot more stable than cvs snapshots - try comparing firefox 0.9 with one of the developer snapshots or nightly CVS builds from around that time.

        • " And 0.9 is "stable?" I thought 1.0 was the stable release..."

          There's a difference between 'stable' and 'feature-complete'.

          If the working parts of an app are solid, but the app as a whole is not feature-complete, then it makes sense to keep it in beta (i.e. sub-1.0). But there's no harm in making it clear to people that the parts that do work aren't likely to break in unforeseen ways.

          Does that make it any clearer?

    • Why have deadlines?

      Because that's when testing can start. While software starts with development, it's testing that finishes it off with that shiny look :)

      A little bit off-topic: every developer should really check out Brian Marick's website [testing.com]. This developer has a firm focus on testing and offers lots of hands-on tips.

    • Re:I could be out of line... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:26PM (#12433833) Homepage Journal
      And, if we deleted the word "cold" from the dictionary, we wouldn't have need for central heating anymore. ;-)

      It's not deadlines that are toxic to commercial endeavors -- it's deadlines * promises, driven by the imperative to capture customer before the competition does. If you promise more than your competitors, but too far in the future, then you have no competitive advantage. If you promise too much less than your competitors, but sooner, then you have no competitive advantage.

      The ideal is to have much more than your competition, much sooner. The only way to do that is to be more productive than average.

      Since mathematically everyone can't be above average, the typical experience is that you end up with an unfinished pile of shit when your deadline rolls up. Deleting some of the pile simply leaves you with a smaller pile of shit. So the only solution is to let the deadlines slip.

    • It's feature deadlines that lead to bad software: sales-oriented people telling the public that the next version will have some whoop-bang feature, and it'll be ready in two month's time (which happens to perfectly coincide with the christmas shopping spree).

      A number of Free Software/Open Source projects recently have had success with a different approach, which is to set a Release Deadline. The difference is that, with a release deadline, only features which are ready by the freeze date make it in. Oth

    • Well perhaps by rushing and releasing beta quality code, they hope to emulate windows more accurately.

  • Thanks to CodeWeavers (Score:5, Informative)

    by XanC ( 644172 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @01:54PM (#12433548)
    We use their fine product to allow library patrons to run MS Office on some of our public workstations. It's great to know how much they contribute back to Wine and the community.

    Kudos to them!


    • For $40 you can easily deal with MS office documents and other legacy issues. I have used it for years and I have been quite happy. Well worth the money!

  • Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @01:56PM (#12433562)
    Just curious if something like this would be possible, i.e. to have a plugin to VisualStudio.NET that will notify at the time of writing the code whether a certain function exists inside the Wine compatibility layer. The thought behind this would be to get into developers' heads the idea that either not being lazy or rather putting in a bit more effort at the time of writing the code would ensure compatibility down the line and open up more avenues of possibility for their application.

    • Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just curious if something like this would be possible, i.e. to have a plugin to VisualStudio.NET that will notify at the time of writing the code whether a certain function exists inside the Wine compatibility layer. The thought behind this would be to get into developers' heads the idea that either not being lazy or rather putting in a bit more effort at the time of writing the code would ensure compatibility down the line and open up more avenues of possibility for their application.

      You phrase that i

      • Well, it's just the way you write for multiple platforms in pretty much every language. For example, when writing C code you have to have in mind where it's going to run. If you call mmap you have to know that it doesn't exist on Windows, for instance.

        A tool that would allow me to specify a list of systems I want to be compatible with and then warns about things that wouldn't work on some of them would actually be very handy.
    • i.e. to have a plugin to VisualStudio.NET

      Or you could switch to wxWidgets.
    • That's actually a very good idea, but not so much for new projects. As others have said, I think writing a portable application is a much better idea than writing a Win32/Wine tolerant application, as a truly portable application will run on far more than just Win32 and x86 Linux. Having said that though, just going through and tweaking (or implementing the missing pieces in Wine instead!) an already existing project so that it's also compatible with Wine is a pretty good idea. If you coupled something like

  • You know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MisanthropicProgram ( 763655 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:04PM (#12433631)
    there will be no Wine before its time!

    Ok, OK! I won't give up my day job! Oh wait, I don't have a day job.

    I going to go and cry now. Manly tears.

  • Women (Score:5, Funny)

    by alta ( 1263 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:04PM (#12433633) Homepage Journal
    Wow, all the women in that pictures really says a lot. ...Geeks

  • Group Photo (Score:4, Funny)

    by dgos78 ( 881140 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:04PM (#12433635)
    All those bodies, and so little testosterone.

    It's a joke! Sorry, I couldn't come up with anything else.
    • Hmm. I'm not convinced that geeks lack testosterone, despite their usual small size. After all, geeks are generally male, so there must be some connection there with male hormones. Also, some geeks consider themselves slightly autistic, and autism is sometimes considered to be a form of "extreme male brain".

  • wine bugs havent seen enough work (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eternal_Flame ( 822984 ) <Flame232@Gmail.com> on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:07PM (#12433664)
    I like wine. I really do, I've been using it for over a year now and have never had many real (unsolveable) issues from the few win games I own or any other win32 app I feel like running under it.
    My only true complaint with Wine is how 2/3 of the apps that do work give weird errors and require a lot of tweaking before they actually execute correctly. Its not that I seriously mind messing with the wine config files or spending the time to do so, but it would just be a whole lot easier if it worked by default. Some of the smaller bugs I've found havent been solved over the course of the last year, and I can only hope this new system of deadlines encourages more rapid development to fix the little things those before any new work is done in other areas like directx or 3d support
    • > Its not that I seriously mind messing with the wine config files

      I do. Want to tell us what to do to get Microsoft Word to run? Or where to find out?
    • But that's just what the 0.9, and 1.0, releases are all about.

      The idea is to focus Wine on the "just work" angle. We've had TONS of improvement already. Wine now autogenerates a basic configuration when first run. We got rid of the config file. We added a GUI configuration tool (readonly at this stage). We made drive mapping immediately clear to anyone who bothers to look.

      We still have a little more to go. That's why Alexandre allowed himself to bring up a deadline for 0.9. We need the configuration tool

  • Nerds (Score:4, Funny)

    by Stibidor ( 874526 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:18PM (#12433760) Homepage
    When I saw the group photo, I thought, "What a bunch of nerds!" And my heart longed to be there...

  • Wine 1.0 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is the performance target for Wine 1.0 that any (and I mean *any*) Win32 program will run on Linux?

    • Re:Wine 1.0 (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Is the performance target for Wine 1.0 that any (and I mean *any*) Win32 program will run on Linux?

      That will never happen. Even Microsoft can't get *all* Win32 programs to work on newer versions of Windows. Some of them depend on low-level hardware access, specific Win9x kernel data structures, etc.

      The best I'd hope for is that any *sane* Win32 program will run on Wine. Meaning any program that sticks to the Win32 API (and maybe even programs using undocumented functions, but not the ones using crazy hac
      • Perhaps those that can't work the Wine team should put in "not supported" messages for? That way, folks wouldn't tend to blame WINE, but the application.
  • It's about time we got an official release of WINE. I've been getting into Linux music lately and WINE is one of the biggest problems. I'm trying to run freest (a wrapper for Windows VST plugins using WINE), and it is incompatible with the newer versions of WINE. So when WINE goes stable, Paul Davis will hopefully fix whatever's keeping fst from working with new versions of WINE.
    • I've been getting into Linux music lately

      So why use Windows tools any more?

      This is not a troll, I use Linux and Free software to make music myself, for example Audacity [sourceforge.net], Ecasound [eca.cx] and Soundtracker [soundtracker.org] . These are definitely not the most advanced examples, but they suffice for me for now.

      • Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN (Score:4, Insightful)

        by vinn ( 4370 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @04:29PM (#12435115) Homepage Journal
        I think there's three reasons, two of which are undeniable. First, there's a lot of legacy apps out there that are unsupported and won't be updated because the vendor went out of business. Personally I support 3 applications like that. So it becomes a matter of finding a native replacement which may not exist or be worth switching too if works with Wine. Second, there's a phenomenal amount of software that's been created for Windows. All kinds of odd little apps for doing things like interior design and such that don't exist on Linux. Finally, and this is the item a lot of people will disagree with, many commercial applications are just plain better on Windows. More effort has been put into designing UI's and such. (For the record, I personally use free software always as my first choice based on the principle of free, as in libre, software.)
        • I agree with your general idea. However, the grandparent was specifically about "getting into Linux music". If that is the goal, I think it is sensible to get rid of Windows apps.
        • Well getting stuck with unsupported applications is one of the biggest dangers of using propriatory software.
          You also can't guarantee that these apps will continue working on newer versions of windows nor can you guarantee that older versions of windows will run on newer hardware, meaning you'l need to continue using old versions on old hardware which will become increasingly dangerous (no security patches) and difficult (no support for new protocols such as ipv6) to use in a networked environment.

  • Just in time for Longhorn... (Score:4, Funny)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:57PM (#12434136) Journal
    ... which will change all the APIs

    • Yep... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Illissius ( 694708 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @04:12PM (#12434900)
      ...so ironically enough, people will move to Linux+wine instead as the path of least resistance :).

      Which would be the case if the new APIs mattered at all to existing applications, which they don't -- they will continue working just as well as they always have with the existing ones. Microsoft is quite anal about this. So no need to emulate Longhorn until apps actually depend on it, which won't be till some time after it's released, I think.
    • And all the vendors will instantly stop coding stuff that can run on, say, Windows XP, because they know that everyone went out and upgraded on the release day...

      Apps will still be written for old version of Windows (and Wine) for a long time.

  • Longhorn will rain on the parade... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shawnce ( 146129 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:57PM (#12434139) Homepage
    With all of the changes coming in Longhorn it is gonna be interesting to see how long it will take for WINE to gain parity.

    The have a lot of API to implement.

  • has anyone tried the directx9 patches? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sark666 ( 756464 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @02:58PM (#12434155)
    from here: http://directxwine.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    Curious what dx9 games people have thrown at it to see what works. Also wondering when these would make it in mainline.
    • wondering when these would make it in mainline

      Soon, A lot of refactoring has taken place and I've been trying to iron out the bugs outside of winecvs so that I can send in clean, reasonably well tested patches. Some work has already made it to mainline, and I've got some more work implementing stateblocks that should be going in tomorow.

  • I need to stop playing MMORPGs (Score:3, Funny)

    by Minwee ( 522556 ) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @03:00PM (#12434171) Homepage
    I can't be the only one who expected to see "" under each of the names in the group photo.
    • Nor can I be the only one who just had a hard, brutal reminder to Preview and look closely before submitting. Let's try that again.

      I can't be the only one who expected to see "<WINE Developers>" under each of the names in the group photo.

  • Will WINE be relevant? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Eric Damron ( 553630 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @03:55PM (#12434696)
    This is not a troll or flamebait. I really wonder how much longer the concept of running Windows applications on Linux will be relevant? WINE has been a slow moving product. I remember playing around with it ten years ago and to this day most applications fail to run properly under WINE. This isn't a statement about the quality of the development team but rather the difficulty in porting the libraries from a closed source OS that is continuously changing.

    It just seems to me that Linux is coming into it's own. How much longer will it be before many programs are released for Windows and Linux? As more and more applications are released for both platforms WINE becomes less and less important.

    I haven't purchased a new Windows program for some time now as Linux comes with everything I need for my day to day work. It would be nice to be able to run some of my older stuff under Linux but that's mostly games. I've supported WineX or whatever they are calling their product now days for years with monthly donations in the hopes that it will become very useful but still there are only a handful of games that run perfectly under WineX. Most don't run at all.

    I'm thinking that rather that rewrite the Windows libraries we should concentrate on libraries like SDL that can be installed on both Windows and Linux thus giving the developer a uniform API that can targeted both OSes.
    • That depends on who you're talking about, to the typical Emailer/web surfer, Wine is already irrelevant. They can already Email people and surf the web just fine with any number of native Linux programs.

      At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is wher

    • Depends a whole lot on your applications. I couldn't possibly switch my day-to-day desktop to Linux because the apps just don't cut it for me. The idea of a Windows server makes me cringe, but for me the Linux desktop is a spare-time toy.

      Top of the list is email! There's nothing on Linux like Eudora, which some people may have kind of gotten working under WINE, but it beats me how. (Of course getting anything working under WINE is a challenge, given the "programmer's toy" setup. I am not a programmer or

    • Very (Score:2)

      by hayden ( 9724 )
      I really wonder how much longer the concept of running Windows applications on Linux will be relevant?
      It'll be very relevent for older windows apps that don't run on recent windows versions. For me it's specifically old games that I occasionally like to play (such as Fallout).

  • A.V.O.A.T. (Score:2, Funny)

    by glamslam ( 535995 )
    Check out the group photo

    Which, iconically, is the same group photo displayed on the website for A.V.O.A.T. (the Association of Virgins Over the Age of 20)...

    • It's really interesting how such myths spread. I think the most interesting things are just how much computer geeks are NOT foreign to sex.

      Now, some of the new people I'm not sure about. If you take the intersection of the people from this year's photo and last year's photo [theshell.com], you'll have a hard time finding a wine hacker appearing in both that is not either married, or has had a GF for over half a year (You will find me in the bottom row in the new picture. Personally, I more or less belong in both catego

  • Wine has definitely matured in the last year or so (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Last year around this time, only a few apps I ran were running bug-free, and it still had a clunky config. Now, most of the apps I have tested run nearly flawlessly, and at full speed, in fact, running the sega genesis emulator, gens, runs faster than the linux native version (the linux native port is half-assed IMHO) and I no longer get sound clipping issues.

    if you run ubuntu, check their downloads page for an up to date repository.
    I'm currently seeing if GunBound will run on wine, so far so good, it inst
  • As it is finally shaping up for the 32-bit world, both Windows and Unixes are moving into 64-bit.

    Will Wine be able to run 64-bit Windows programs on FreeBSD or Linux amd64? Not any time soon...

    Running 32-bit Windows programs on a 64-bit Unix? Forget it...

    • ...Unixes are moving into 64-bit...

      What? I don't mean to nitpick but I do believe that Unixes have been 64bit for quite some time. SGI/SUN/Tru64/AIX.... are all 64bit and have been for about 10 years or more. I wouldn't call that "moving into", I'd call that "well established".

      Unix is not only (sort of)GNU/Linux or BSD. There are other machines out there other than your precious x86.

      .haeger

    • Running 32-bit Windows programs on a 64-bit Unix? Forget it...

      32 bit Wine (and Win32 apps) runs today on a AMD64 running a 64 bit distro if you have installed the 32 bit libs for your distro.

      It's not 100% native, but then running any Win32 program on a 64 bit OS isn't either...

      • 32 bit Wine (and Win32 apps) runs today on a AMD64 running a 64 bit distro if you have installed the 32 bit libs for your distro.
        Really? Khmm... Someone ought to fix the FreeBSD port [freshports.org] of WINE. It is currently marked i386-only... Thanks.

        • The FreeBSD port (maintained by Gerald Pfeiffer) has been know to be broken in the past year, sometimes for a couple of months. Not necessarily Gerald's fault, sometimes there were new features introduced which just didn't work on FreeBSD until somebody took some time to port it (or FreeBSD supported something Wine began relying on). But when there are no Wine developers besides the FreeBSD port maintainer who uses it, it can take some time to implement those.

          Also, I don't know what's the status of FreeBSD

  • Does that mean we can celebrate Serenity's release with two sets of Wine?

    (Actually no, here in Oz we probably won't get it by then :( )

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